Meet BITSians in Sports: BITS2Fitness Thirteenth Interview: Sneha Mehta (BITS-Hyd’14)

#MeetBitsiansInSports

Our 13th Interviewee for “Meet the BITSians in Sports” series is Sneha Mehta(2009B4A7PS639H).

Sneha served as the Sports Secretary(Girls) in Bits Pilani Hyderabad for the academic year 2012-2013 batch. She was also the team captain for girl’s basketball team in Spree(Bits Goa’s Annual Sports Meet). She has co-organized Bits Pilani Hyderabad’s first ever sports meet, Arena in 2012. Currently pursuing her PhD in Data Mining at Virginia Tech, Sneha shares her fitness story with us..

Name : Sneha Mehta

BITS ID : 2009B4A7PS639H

Q. What motivated you to pursue fitness in the first place?

When I was very young, my mom made me join a nearby Basketball coaching center. As I grew up, I became really good and passionate about it. Eventually I got selected to represent my district in multiple state level championships. Good performance in one of those championships got me selected to represent my state of Maharashtra in a national level championship that was to be held in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.  This tournament was memorable as we defeated the then defending champions Chhattisgarh in extra time at semi-finals and finally went on to win the championship by defeating the home team. This win was special because Maharashtra girls hadn’t won a gold in 13 years. This experience motivated me even further and I continued playing semi-professional basketball until 12th grade. Along with that, in school, I was part of the local NCC battalion and went on several camps. One of them was especially memorable because it was a one month national trekking camp and I got exposure to real camping in the wild. So I’ve been athletic from a very young age and fitness has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Q. What are the sports/activities you are involved in and how did you
get into playing these sports?

I got introduced to Basketball at a very young age. Being good at Basketball gave me an an advantage in picking up the basics of other sports quickly. So in the 9th grade, I was the vice-captain of my school’s Throwball team that represented Vidarbha in National Throwball Championship held in Thane, Mumbai. Besides that I also played Volleyball and Shot put in school representing my ‘house’. In college, I’ve mostly spent time playing Basketball and we formed a team that represented our campus at Spree 2011 (BITS Goa Sports Fest). We lost the semi-finals to the home team by a whisker in a nail-biting encounter. I’ve also been involved in administrative activities pertaining to sports in college and was elected as a sports secretary for the year 2012-2013. After graduating, I’ve mostly played badminton (I had taken a bit of a badminton coaching when I was still in college) and Table Tennis. I was also into long distance running (mostly 10K). My best timing for 10K was 55 mins. A couple of years back I joined grad school as a PhD student. Here, I’m involved in badminton, Table Tennis and Wallyball ( a fun version of Volleyball played on a squash court and you’re allowed to bounce the ball off the walls!). I’ve played intra-university badminton, singles and mixed doubles tournaments here for two years. In 2015, I was the 1st runner-up in singles and our team was the 2nd runner-up in mixed doubles and in 2016 our team was the first runner-up in mixed doubles.

Q. How often do you engage in each of them? Any routine you follow?

I engage in the activities mentioned above 2-3 times a week or as often as my schedule allows me too.  There’s no specific routine, but I make it a point to not let a week pass by without some form of physical activity. Usually I hit the gym 4-5 days a week, at gym I do 40 min cardio (15 mins warm up followed by 25 mins interval training) , weight training and abs workout. Or I opt to run for 5kms.

Q. Were you actively involved in any sports activity in BITS? Any particular memory from BITS that motivated you to stay fit?

I was a part of the initial batches of BITS Hyderabad. The campus construction was still underway and we didn’t have SAC or basketball courts or any of those equipment as you know it today. So some of us juniors along with our seniors used to go to the city to play basketball. I think those times were really memorable and helped us really bond with the seniors and motivated us to continue the incredible sports legacy of our seniors.

Q. How do you manage to spare time for these activities while working full time?  

Yes it’s hard to find time, but since I’ve always been involved in some kind of physical activity it’s hard for me to let a week pass by without any activity. So I always manage to somehow squeeze in time for those activities.

Q. Do you take special care of your diet in everyday life?

No I don’t follow a specific diet, but I make sure that whatever I eat is reasonably healthy. I try to minimize sugar in-take, try to stay away from deep-fried stuff, try to have a variety in my diet so that I get as many nutrients as possible.

Q. Finally, what would be your advice to the BITSian community to stay
fit and healthy?

There are countless proofs that physical activity does good for you in long term and in your day to day life. So I would advice students/alumni to get involved in any kind of sports/physical activity, it not only improves your physique/health but also fosters certain personality traits that might be useful in the future in any kind of career you would want to pursue/pursuing.

Interviewed By : Praharshitha KV(2011A7PS019H)

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An Interview with Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan

Antibiotic resistance is a burning topic today and there is very little awareness in the world about it. Did you know that antibiotics are a finite resource? Did you know that the existing antibiotic drugs are going to stop working for everyone in some years from now? On the occasion of World Antibiotic Awareness Week (November 16 to 22), WHO launched the first global campaign for the better use of antibiotics.

Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan

Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan – Batch of 1988

We, at  BITSAA, caught up with Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, a fellow BITSian from the batch of 1988 who has been one of the forerunners in advocating this cause worldwide: from being a part of the Advisory Committee formed by President Obama to tackle this problem in the USA to being actively involved with the Government of India’s Mission Indradhanush.

Dr. Laxminarayan is currently the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy at Washington DC, and is the Vice-President for Research and Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI).

After graduating from BITS with an Electronics and Instrumentation degree, he went to pursue a  PhD in Economics and a Masters in Public Health.

He is also a senior research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University.  He has worked comprehensively with the World Health Organization (WHO), the US National Academies of Science/Institute of Medicine and World Bank on evaluating malaria treatment policy, vaccination strategies, the economic burden of tuberculosis, and control of non-communicable diseases.

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You have had a very unique career path. You did your Instrumentation at BITS, then you came to the US for your Masters in Public Health with a focus on Epidemiology, and then you went on to do your PhD in Economics. So how did this transition happen?

Right after BITS, I had fallen ill during my Practice School, so I graduated about 6 months after the rest of my class because I had to redo my PS. So, I did two things during that time. I was a PS2 instructor and I was also working on setting up an NGO to clean up the Adayar and Koovam  rivers in Chennai, which if you’ve lived in Chennai, you know these aren’t exactly pleasant places to be. I have always had this interest in the environment. That is something I am very passionate about.  I actually didn’t go in for a Masters first, I went in for a PhD in Economics, with a focus on Environmental Economics and I went to work with someone very specific at the University of Washington that I read about.

I went to Seattle for this and for my visitation, I decided to work on a topic which was a little unusual which was to think of the effectiveness of antibiotics as a natural resource, much like you’d think of fish or trees. The topic was not yet so much in the news as it is these days. That’s why I went in to do that and it was what I was interested in. I did my PhD on that and along the way to learn the public health aspects, I enrolled in classes on Epidemiology and Biostatistics and so forth and my Masters in Public Health was incidental and not the trajectory I was really on.

More than 10 years after that, I went to work at a Think Tank at Washington DC, called ‘Resources for the future’, which is considered a centre of the mind space for the people working in Environmental Economics at Washington DC. So I joined this organization and I was teaching at Johns Hopkins.

Around 2007, I switched to teaching at Princeton but I kept my job at Resources for the future. However, by that time I was a lot more drawn into public health in a more general sense, like disease control project which is a very central academic exercise in the world of global health. Although I had one leg in the environmental side, even at Princeton my appointment was and is at the Princeton Environmental Institute, I was still drawn into these other directions like working for Public Health.

I’m really not a health economist, I’m really an economist who is interested in the environment. But subsequently I have done a lot more work on just pure health, on things like vaccines and malaria.

In 2011, I had moved to India to set up and work on the Public Health Foundation of India. At the same time, I had set up a Think Tank in DC called Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy. It was obviously a sort of balancing act between Princeton and these two jobs. There is a consistency in the thread that I’m interested in these ideas but I didn’t really set out to do Epidemiology to begin with.

Is it challenging to do this kind of multi-tasking?

It is and it isn’t! If you’re interested in an idea and you’re interested in following the idea to its multiple conclusions, it’s like one big exclamation. To me it’s just a lot of fun, I’m really lucky to have the freedom to think about whatever I want to think about and I value that above everything else. That’s something that comes from being in academics fundamentally, although I have these other jobs which are administrative and to run organisations. At the core of it, it’s the gift of being in academia. And then you get to learn, I really didn’t go to a lot of classes when I was in BITS, so this is an opportunity for me!

Talking of BITS, what was your BITSian life all about? What would be the one, most prominent memory of your BITSian life?

The answer would need a book. BITS was one, long trip – forming friendships that would last decades, and realizing that much of education is outside the classroom. It is hard to overestimate the impact that that place has had on me in every dimension. That moment I described where Dr Venkateswaran just listens to us for five minutes and then says – go for it – those were moments that were tremendous for confidence building and believe in oneself.

BITS helped me grow in many ways but particularly in being adaptable and resilient. I was secretary of ELAS during my time there and we were constantly creating and making do with less both during the year and during APOGEE and Oasis. That’s a valuable lesson for life.

We started TRACS (Trekking Club) on April 6, 1990 after a trek to Pindari glacier that Sanjay Ramabhadran and I went on. We were totally unprepared, wore tennis shoes and no gloves and somehow made it there and back.  When we got back, we went to see the then director Dr. V  who immediately asked what we would need and assigned Rs 10,000 to purchase equipment.  It was unbelievable! Earlier this year, I took my son on the Pindari trek, 25 years after Sanjay and I went there. It was exciting to do this again. I’ve trekked in many places around the world but Pindari was my first major trek and one of my most memorable.

About antibiotic resistance…We understand the problem in hand: With the abuse of antibiotics, we have unknowingly assisted the proliferation of antibiotic resistant bacteria and now we are struggling to find effective ways to treat bacterial infections. How was this even identified as a global health issue?

The issue has been known since the time of Alexander Fleming, the person who discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin. And in fact, resistance has been with us for a very long time and it isn’t unusual at all. This is a problem that has slowly increased over time to reach the situation it is in now, where half the antibiotics don’t work. So, it is not a surprising problem, it’s just basically natural selection of sensitive bacteria where we are left with only the resistant bacteria.

It’s not rocket science in that way but as a consequence, we are facing a huge public health crisis. In many parts of the world the antibiotics are no longer working and we don’t have a good alternative. So, we either have to start using the antibiotics that we do have, responsibly or we really risk being in a situation where someone with an infectious disease has a higher probability of dying.

So, what’s the economic aspect to this problem?

This is an economic problem because it is a problem of the commons. And by that I mean, if I take medicines for heart disease or arthritis, that doesn’t change the effect of these drugs for you or for anyone else. But that is not true in the case of antibiotics because if I take antibiotics, then since I am selecting for the resistant bacteria and these can get transmitted, it won’t work so well for you or for other people. So in that sense it’s a global common issue where actions of an individual or groups of individuals have consequences for everyone else. It starts looking much more like a problem of climate change than it does like a medical problem.

Doctors in the United States and presumably in India as well, prescribe a lot of antibiotics. Why do they do so? Is it because they are not cognizant of this problem?

Well, there is a reason why they do offer antibiotics, but it is not always backed up with substantial evidence. At the end of the day, when you think of the doctor-patient interaction, it is in the realm of soft side. There is a dynamic there. The doctor wants to satisfy the patient, they don’t want the patient to go to a different doctor. It is not a precise engineering sort of equation where the doctor says, yes you need an antibiotic and writes out one where it’s appropriate or he says, oh you don’t need one and doesn’t write one where it is not appropriate. Because there is that human interaction, there is room for all these other considerations to come into play.

How serious is the problem of anti-biotic resistance in countries around the world and what is each country doing about it?

There is a report that we put out last week for the state of the world’s antibiotics: http://www.cddep.org/publications/state_worlds_antibiotics_2015

The problem is all around the world although of varying magnitudes but it’s certainly all around the world. We worked in many countries. The global antibiotic resistance partnership works in over eight countries: India, Nepal, Vietnam and then Mozambique, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. So, we do a lot of global work as well.

Let’s take India, for instance. At the government level, are they aware of this problem, and do they know that this will become serious in the times to come?

Very much so! But, you know, all these things always are a question of priorities. And sometimes, the instinct is to go after what is on the front page news rather than to solve a problem that is two or four years away. Even if it is here right now, there is not a public outcry at all. I think India has not done enough on this problem. Extensive coverage by media and cover stories on newspapers are the kind of stuff that are important. Because at the end of the day, it is the civil society and the media that put pressure on the government to act. In the US, there has been a lot of action. Last year, president Obama assigned an executive board on antibiotic resistance. In fact, I was on advisory committee to recommend solutions on how to tackle the problem. Some countries much more action, India, sadly, not so much.

Are people aware of the seriousness of this issue? Do we have data to convince people that this is a serious issue?

I think there is enough data but obviously, you are talking to someone who pays attention to this data, particularly because that is my career. I don’t know of others though. Ask your mother or grandmother, if they realize that this is important. I still find that a lot of people use antibiotics quite unnecessarily and they don’t understand this issue. But this can change. It is similar to, for instance, tobacco usage.

When I visited BITS last year, I found that nobody smoked at Sky! Back then, it was unimaginable. Twenty years ago, when I think practically, everyone would have smoked. So, that’s a significant change in not just the institution rules but also what is considered acceptable in your generation compared to mine. I think it is a change in the mindset of the people. So, I think the current situation, with respect to antibiotic usage, would change and it can change. In fact, we don’t have a choice, it has to change!

How can a common man contribute towards solving this issue, however small the scale may be? What would your advice be for a doctor and a patient?

Doctors don’t have that much of an incentive except they can get information and get aware of the damage they are causing. For individuals, I don’t think people realize that if they take antibiotics unnecessarily, they are ruining the chances of the drug working for others as well. A patient always wants the best medication. And he wants to get cured asap. That’s all he cares about in the spur at the moment. That’s the reason it’s the problem of the commons. The commons problem, by definition, is one where you do not consider the effect of your actions on others and therefore you do it just like pollution or driving a car excessively and so forth.

Isn’t it easier to educate doctors?

That is a great point and that would be the rational thing to do. But, the doctor has other incentives. They don’t know if you might come back. They just want to give you something that gets you out of their office asap. They want to make their money in 2 minutes and that’s the way a lot of doctors think. It takes the doctor to exercise some due diligence and some additional network in order to not write the antibiotic prescription. Unfortunately, they don’t have that incentive.

Are there ways of initiating new incentives to get more people to act, then?

Financial incentives are a way to ensure appropriate use of antibiotics, for instance, change the way doctors get paid. But it isn’t that easy. In China, a lot of hospitals overuse antibiotics because that’s how they make their money. Now, you have to change the way these hospitals get paid, so that they don’t rely on the selling more antibiotics to make money. So, these are the challenges that make this problem multisegmented.

What are the strategies, be it in India by the PHFI or in the US by the CDDP, which are being implemented now to try to solve the issue?

There have been different sorts of approaches. Back in 2002, we had the same issue with anti-malarial drugs as well, so, this is very topical. Yesterday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Youyou Tu and she was part of a team that was credited with the discovery of artemisinin, which is now the front line drug for malaria. Back in 2001, there was a serious concern that because this drug was being used by itself as a monotherapy, that resistance would arise. A group of us had put together a report which was led by a Nobel laureate, Kenneth Arrow, one of the most prominent economists alive today or probably even alive at any time. We had a report which basically called for a global financing mechanism that would make these antimalarial, the quality ones that were in combinations and less likely to be resistant, cheaper. So what that means is that if you make the combinations cheaper, then no one will use the type that will cause resistance. But because this was a global commons issue, this couldn’t be paid at the country level so that it could be paid at the global level.

And subsequently, we did manage to establish something called the affordable medicines facility for malaria. It was close to a half a billion dollar facility that would allow us to subsidize quality antimalarials at a very high level. So, that is an example of the kind of thing we have done at the global level. At country levels, the solutions are actually not that difficult. The first is to improve public health.

In India, there is now a big program called Mission Indradhanush which is a part of my immunization work. We can get vaccines out so that children are less likely to need antibiotics. Second is, of course, water sanitation which is slowly improving. Third area is the hospital infection control. A lot of hospitals overuse antibiotics because they have no incentive to reduce the quantity of infections. This is a major focus in India because no one is really aware of the fact that there is high likeliness to get infected when you go to the hospital for some other condition, say for example, you go for a hip replacement and you could get a hospital acquired infection.

So, the pathways to solving the problem are quite clear but gathering the tools to implement them is the real challenge.

Essentially, the common theme underlying the three approaches you spoke about, to solve the issue of antibiotic resistance, is prevention of infections. If this can’t be achieved, is there a way to make a superior antibiotic to outplay the resistant bacterial strains? And if we can, will it go through the same cycle of becoming ineffective since the bacteria will evolve to become resistant to them at some point? Are we getting into a vicious cycle then?

That’s exactly right. We can’t outplay the bacteria at this scale because they will always come up with solutions faster than we can come up with a new drug. So, our solution so far has been to stay one step ahead, by coming up with a new antibiotic. But that is a very expensive way of staying ahead. Instead, what we should do now is to slow down this race between us and the bacteria by reducing selection pressure. So, there are two things. One is to reduce the need for antibiotics, that’s what you just mentioned.

Lots of antibiotics get seriously overused because people buy antibiotics over the counter, they self medicate, doctors prescribe them unnecessarily. In the US, about half of the antibiotic usage is considered unnecessary and I speculate the proportion in India might be even higher. Also, antibiotics are used in animals for making them fatter, faster and so forth. At some point, we really have to make a tradeoff.

If you truly want antibiotics to save a dying child’s life, then you can’t use it for all the other things that it is being used for. It’s amazing the wide range of things that antibiotics are used for, like aquaculture, for shrimp farming and anything that requires the bacteria to stay at a distance. You really can’t have it all. Once the environment is made up of resistant bacteria, you can’t turn the clock back.

That is precisely my next question. Is this change even reversible now? Are we going to be able to combat these bugs once let’s say they are all going to be antibiotic resistant and we are going to go back to using them appropriately?

That’s a good point. It actually turns out that the answer is a little more complicated. In a general sense, the resistant genes, the genes that are selecting for resistance are out there in the environment. You can think of it like this: all the information is out there, it’s a big library and any bacteria can check out the book and figure out how to be resistant and then learn that process. So, they have the common knowledge. However, if we use lesser antibiotics, then there is less chance where the bacteria are actually using that information. A slightly scientific explanation is that there is a process called fitness cost of resistance.

If you are a bacteria and you are maintaining the knowledge of how to be resistant, you are doing something else less effective than likely, which could be reproduction or the thickness of your cell wall or something along those lines. So, there is a cost of resistance and therefore not all bacteria are always up to date on the knowledge of how to be resistant. You can be sure, however, that when you use antibiotics, they will quickly learn. If we start reducing the use of antibiotics, it is very likely that that resistance will go down. It will take time but it has been shown to happen in many instances.

Would monitoring pharmacies help collect better, more realistic data on the overuse of antibiotics? That way, we will have authentic information to act upon.

Well, you think that pharmacies can be monitored? What they do is against the law. The law says that you need a prescription. I can guarantee you that if you walk across to any pharmacy and ask for an antibiotic, they’ll give it to you. They’ll give the most powerful antibiotic that they can sell to you. So, here in India, we don’t have a regulatory system that is able to enforce a rule that has been in existence for a very very long time. These are not new regulations.

There did exist a pre-antibiotic era where people managed to fight bacterial infections and hence survive. Is there a possibility for our immune system co-evolve to combat the antibiotic resistant bacterial strains?

I don’t know if our immune system will help us, but certainly the burden of infectious diseases is much lower now, compared to before. For that reason, antibiotic resistance may not be that big of a problem now, as it would have been before. For instance, vaccines and better sanitation were not common then. On the flip side, a lot of things we do now require the use of antibiotics, like surgeries and transplants, that were not so prevalent before.  It is virtually impossible to cut open someone’s body without using antibiotics. So, here, we will need more antibiotics than the past.

 

How about allocating funding for research groups that work on finding solutions for the issue of antibiotic resistance? Has this money allocation increased in the recent times, since the advent of this issue? Seems like a prudent way of spending money to prevent the problem.

Sadly this has not happened except in a few exceptions.  India has almost no additional resources to offer.  Many high-income countries have chosen to spend their money on subsidizing industry research on specific antibiotics.  More money is needed for research on how to reduce the likelihood of resistance and how to make better use of existing antibiotics including behavioral research to help reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics.

Recently, we saw that Youyou Tu, the Nobel Prize winner for finding a novel cure for malaria, found the cure in natural herbs. So, do you think that we should complement allopathic medicine with other systems of medicine, such as ayurveda, thereby reducing our dependency on antibiotics? Should India and the world then revamp their medical courses and include all relevant systems of medical treatment in their curriculum?

This is not straightforward. Artemisinin, the drug that Youyou Tu and colleagues isolated was found from sweet wormwood. Simply drinking wormwood tea would not have helped most malaria patients. So isolating the active ingredient was critical. Searching traditional products for such active ingredients would be a productive activity. I’m not sure every allopathic doctor can become expert in non-allopathic modalities any more than an ayurvedic doctor can learn western surgical procedures through a few courses.

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We hope you enjoyed this interview with Dr. Laxminarayan. Let us all be aware of this global threat called antibiotic resistance, swear to be more prudent and cautious with the use of antibiotics and spread the awareness around, like the World Health Organization (WHO) wants us to! (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/events/2015/world-antibiotic-awareness-week/event/en/)

To learn more about Dr. Laxminarayan’s research and his initiatives to address antibiotic resistance, below are a few weblinks to his talks and interviews:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ramanan_laxminarayan_the_coming_crisis_in_antibiotics

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/17/421490567/how-did-a-medical-miracle-turn-into-a-global-threat

http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/11/05/us-health-infections-antibiotic-resistan-idINKCN0SU2ST20151105

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/open-magazine/how-india-became-the-anti_b_8440100.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/ramanan-laxminarayan-the-global-reach-of-resistance/

BITS-AMP – Second session coming soon!

In an effort to bring the huge number of BITSians in all parts of the world closer to the initiatives of their alumni association, this first of many posts is about the Alumni Mentorship Program – BITS AMP.

The Comms team had a brief chat with Sandeepa Garlapati for more information on BITS AMP.

BITS AMP is a one-on-one mentorship program that was conceptualized in late 2013 and the first session had its kick off during the BITSAA Global Meet in January 2014 at the Hyderabad campus. The man behind the idea, Venu Palaparthi (batch of 1987), wanted to connect BITSians belonging to the same fields and usher the flow of guidance. He roped in Shivaraaj Kotini (batch of 2006) who had done something similar for BITS Spark and had been leading the Spark Mentors program for 2 years. He had conducted mentor-mentee workshops at few locations in India and had gained excellent insights in the area. However, the task proved big and they needed a volunteer to build the team and fine tune the entire concept from its raw stage. That’s where Sandeepa (batch of 2002) came in. Together they worked for a few months before the first version was presented to the world in January 2014. Kris Inapurapu (batch of 1999) was involved in structuring this program during his studies at MIT and he gave ideas from his experiences in launching a similar program there. Chandra Bhople was instrumental in conceptualizing the program as well. Rohit Koul, ex-CEO of BITSAA, was very interested in this initiative and motivated the team. Sandeepa, very recently, hired people to build the team and currently the size of the AMP team is 4 people.

Venu came up with the idea to crowd source the name and logo for this initiative. A contest was held on Facebook for BITSians and the winner, Ravi Mantri, received an MS Dhoni autographed cricket bat! He, of course, gave BITS-AMP but there were also a lot of interesting names like BITSPlus, BITSBuddy, Marg Darshak that were suggested.

The basic idea behind BITS AMP is that BITSians come together and assist each other in their careers. On the BITS AMP platform, BITSians need to sign up either as mentors or mentees. Then they are paired up  accordingly by the AMP team based on a variety of factors. The most important factor is that both members have the same interests and be in the same fields, career wise. After this, the pairs begin a six month relationship, throughout which the AMP team is in contact with both the mentor and the mentee. This ensures that the relationship is ongoing and stays true to the concept. The AMP team would also help the pair in case they have trouble contacting each other or if they haven’t much to contribute to each other.

After the first session of six months started in Jan 2014, the AMP team took some time to restructure most of the program and make it more streamlined. There were around 18 to 20 pairs made by choosing guests who had attended the BGM. Some of the mentors who participated include Preetish Nijhawan (Managing Partner, Cervin Ventures and Co-founder of Akamai), Anurag Jain (CEO of Access Healthcare), Venu Palaparthi (CEO, Nasdaq OMX), Sudeep Jain IAS (Chairman & MD, Tamil Nadu Solar Energy Development Agency), Arun Jain (Director, Sales and Marketing, TI) Devender Kumar (MD, Ahuja Engineering Services). Sandeepa tells us that this was a great learning experience for the BITS-AMP team.

The second session for which sign-ups have been happening since the last few weeks will be started in October this year. Sign-ups have started coming in. In Order to sign up or the BITS AMP program, click here.

However, everyone who signs up cannot be a part of the program unless a counterpart with similar interests signs up.

The categories for mentorship currently include:

  • Technology Careers (careers in technology – in consulting; at enabling companies; non-technology companies)
  • Business, Strategy, Finance, Consulting, Innovation, Education (includes project management; product management)
  • Entertainment, Media, Marketing, and Advertising (includes creative pursuits such as Film, Music, etc.)
  • Mentoring for Businesses
  • Sciences & Scientific Research

“BITS-AMP’s target audience is the entire BITS community. Our mentoring program will also help students and faculty in realizing their aspirations. BITS-AMP will work in a symbiotic way with the other BITSAA programs such as BITS2MS PhD and BITS2BSCHOOL.”

— Sandeepa Garlapati (BITS Class of ‘06, Coordinator, BITS-AMP)

“To me, any mentoring effort needs to have a way for effective one to one interaction between the mentor and the mentee  with limited or no external intervention. BITS-AMP provides exactly this.”

— Rohit Koul (BITS Class of ‘02, ex-CEO, BITSAA)

 

BITS2BSCHOOL e-interview: Sandeep Thalapaneni (Cornell, Johnson)

Sandeep Thalapaneni is an MBA candidate 2013 at Cornell University-Johnson School of Management and has a Dual degree BE (Hons) EEE and MSc (Hons) Chemistry from BITS, Pilani (2002-2007).

 

Q. Can you share something about your work experience – what has your career progression been like? What was the thought process behind each step?

A. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about B-School at BITS. But I realised very early that it is best to get solid work experience under my belt before I do an MBA and wait for the right moment. I interacted with lot of BITSian alums during this period and used my 5-1 for a thesis in management under the supervision of Prof. Anil Bhatt, which gave me a better perspective. Continue reading

BITS2BSCHOOL e-interview: Abhilash Ravishankar (Berkeley-Haas)

Abhilash Ravishankar is an MBA candidate 2013 at University of California, Berkeley-Haas School of Business and has BE (Hons) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS, Pilani (2003-2007).

 

Q. How did you know you were ready for an MBA?

A. Two reasons:

(a) I spent almost a year managing a team of engineers, and as a general manager, I was exposed to a number of business challenges. These challenges taught me new things and exposed gaps in my skill set.

(b) I felt that I was pigeonholing myself into oilfield operations and I wanted to work in a different capacity. B-School was a great transition platform. Continue reading